BuggyDad

Well, it's still worth having I think. So does it discharge quite effectively? To be fair my HTRC has a reasonable discharge rate. Quick enough to get the job done before it times out at least, unlike the SKYRC one.

Very kind. Thank you. Yes, PETG at the moment. I seem to be getting on really well with my orange PETG filament, a bit less so with the (supposedly otherwise the same) black stuff I have. Next week I should complete my printer enclosure which may help with some materials. The orange PETG thin arm sides you see there have a lot of flex where they're only 2mm thick. This gives me a bit of confidence about the combination of materials - I don't want to make the arms too rigid (or too soft) and I want a fair bit of give before they snap, and I'd also ideally like as much impact absorption from them as possble, through bending and possibly then snapping, before the front chassis part goes. That latter aim might be too much but we're heading in the right direction with it. I have so far used FR4 glass fibre reinforced sheet, after @Mad Ax said it was fast becoming his go to material, and I think it's a great call. CF is probbaly a bit too strong, stiffer than ideal, and harder to work, as well as more expensive, while FR4 feels like a bit of a sweetspot. Perhaps I can end up with FR4 reinforced arms like this alongside a CF reinforced suspension mount/block, in a deliberate attempt to make the arm break first. That's a future iteration but it's my likely aim. If I can get to Tamiya Junkies in a couple of weeks then I hope to run mainly this and my TD4. Oh and I have a new plan for the body - I intend to chop it off at the tower and fit a TD4 Carbon tower and the wing mount that comes with that, to which I'll fit either the RC10 Worlds wing or a pseudo-Egress one. I have a soft spot for the Egress wing and have a few in stock but I think the The RC10 one will suit this car better. I like the rear end of the current body, it's just that it won't survive long. Perhaps I can reattach the back part of it later.

I bought an ultrasonic cleaner some time ago and last week cleaned some absolutely caked in wax, oil, dirt and vegetation bike cassettes, chains and whatnot. It took a couple of goes and some interim brushing but I was very impressed with it. I think my bikes are actually faster as a result 🤣 A trick I learned but haven't tried (simply because the parts I was cleaning were as big as the cleaner) is to fill the cleaner with water and put your parts in, with whatever solution you want them cleaned in, in a sealed bag. This way you only waste a small amount of degreaser and everything outside the bag stays clean. You could then do multiple cleans one after the other. Seemed a pretty sensible idea.

Mine is Kamtec. It's not the sharpest body but it's pretty good and I think for a Falcon runner it's more than adequate.

I had been meaning to follow your lead on that, I'd just forgotten about it. It makes very good sense. I wonder if it'd provide enough current for a USB C laptop?

Its looks have really started to grab me recently. I've been trying to buy a used Avante body for my TD4 and I'm temped to buy an Egress kit and stick an Avante 2001 body on it, so alongside my TD4 I could have a pair of "Not Avantes". I can't quite bring myself to buy a kit and build it as it should be.

Warning: this is a bit of a brain dump! My HTRC T240 duo has all the right things on paper but it confuses me a little, in a couple of ways. Setting it to a storage charge with an end voltage of 3.85V, it quite often stops before the cells get to that. Sometimes not even close. Often it shows the cells at a low voltage, say 3.75V, but it just goes straight to "end", so not even initiating the charge. Another thing it often does is to give over or under voltage errors or connection errors, which again means it won't start a charge. Yet if you set it to monitor it shows a normal condition. None of these things, it seems to me, is consistent to the left or right channel or to a particular battery pack. I swap batteries from left to right channel or unplug and plug back in and always find I can get it going, but it's a bit frustrating and a regular occurrence. I don't think it did this when new but it's been like it a long time. And when it was new, all my batteries were new too. It's 2.5 years old. Some of my batteries aren't in perfect new condition but I think they're all good enough. I also have a newish SKYRC T100 (at my work location) which works consistently on the same packs and is lightening fast, but it is awful at discharging, seems barely capable of it at all. I should've posted this question before cracking on, but I saw a SKYRC D100 V2 second hand on eBay the other day so took a punt on that. Partly for the phone app control but also it seems well liked and decent quality and it seems wise to run only quality chargers. I kind of get the feeling the HTRC is just not really a high quality product. I know folk like it and it has all the right functions but it's a very plasticky thing with one of those old flexy toughscreens. In principle neither of these points tells me anything about the quality of what's inside but it doesn't inspire confidence. And I got it from AliExpress or Bangood, so there's that too, although I doubt it's a brand prone to counterfeiting. I'm not sure what my question is exactly but are these charging issues common? Do others have them with the same charger or others? What do you think about the subject? Do you expect your charging to just work with perfect consistency or do do you expect eg regular connection issues with a spec of dirt or moisture inside a balance plug? And how do you get on with discharging to storage (I avoid it mainly because it takes so long, so haven't tried it in a while)?

Thanks! The BB tub is the Falcon part and although they redesigned the front bulkhead/suspension for the BB, that area is dimensionally good for the body still. Really the only areas where the body needed cutting around anything new were the rear shock tower and my own steering mods.

See also here: Bit more there on arm, hub and CVD options. I've got the DB-01 arms and CVDs in stock to convert mine although I haven't done it yet. It's interesting the change takes shaft length all the way down from 73mm to 64mm, a huge change, but I guess some of that is also to compensate for a longer wheel axle. On CVDs, the 54016 DB-01 rears look a bit thin on the ground now.

Ooh. Mine is the only buggy I have that I haven't done a load of silly modifications to and it runs like a charm. One thing I noted is the slipper is set far too tight to work. I'm about to try a lower profile nut to allow a bit more room while still engaging with the nyloc. They're only a standard 5mm tall unflanged M4 nyloc nut I have but if they solve it then that'll be a little win and I have spares you can have.

Yeah it made me wonder what else it might fit too. I'm going to have a look at my Blitzer diffs since my Fake Falcon has surprisingly turned into a buggy I like driving round a track. Not holding out a huge amount of hope though!

Hey @Frog Jumper this is useful stuff. I did also end up with some yellow CVA1 parts when looking for pseudo-Falcon fronts and I have a feeling they may use some of the same letters for the sprues. I can't remember what I got but on the Boomerang (CVA1) the shock bodies are U (long) and Y (short), with T and X for the pistons, preload clips and those combined bottom eyelet spring cup things. Different part numbers obviously but I thought it worth a little note of caution for folk to check they're getting the generation of shocks they want.

Well, the rear wing off the orange one experienced some gruelling dog fights early in its career and has been considered missing in action since some time in early 2022. The yellow one has a nice Egress style wing that is in good physical (unclear mental) health but is taking a sabbatical from its punishing job, atop a wing mount that is increasingly bruised but will sometime get revived as a slightly different 3d print, as and when I work out how to print in TPU. Wings on these two buggies have a tough time of it. The buggies are tanks, on which fragile protrusions will forever be up against it.

Sad to see you go, pal. These things are frustrating but they're always solvable. Personally I would go and do something else then come back to it fresh another day.

Felt like the first glimmer of summer here and my son and I were on the beach with our DT-03s. We marked out a track with driftwood and rocks and drove round it badly til our batteries ran out, with the odd interuption from a nice dog who was saving the world one evil RC car at a time (our dog is on the same mission, so we left her at home) then we went for cake.

You could make one out of other things 😉 Although mine's more modified, as a minimum it's a Blitzer Beetle with different wheels and yellow shock plastics. Yeah, I know, that's only got one actual Falcon part in it but hey ho, it's an option!

Thats bad luck. I just bought this part for my son's car today. JKRC has it for £14 and I think that's shipped. And it's a less time consuming job to change it than you might expect. In his case the classic front break but after a lot of abuse and even broken it is funning fine with my reinforcements, so fingers crossed we'll be taking ours to the beach tomorrow.

Ta! That chassis question is just idle wondering really to see if its an option, making my own is perhaps more in keeping with how I'm thinking about my Boomerang. I don't want to send you on a wild goose chase but if it's easy I would be interested to know how things compare.

Right, I've gone all in on the TDs - picked up a used TD2 for good price (from Japan, hoping doesn't catch customs) so if they're still going I'll go for one of those Revive RC bodies please. Oh and the TD2 wheels too. Actually, let's go for the 4wd wheels as well 😉 Now, how's the Hotshot carbon chassis different to the Boomerang one? Are they cross-compatible?

What's the issue with the ESC? Isn't it just, zero - ESC button, full fwd - ESC button, full brake - ESC button, same regardless of transmitter?

I came back to the hobby after 30 years away, started off buying a basic stick one (for my son). Slightly regretted that as soon as it came to a second car and a second transmitter. So moved to wheel early. Muscle memory (or whatever it is) from that long ago I figured should be weak - nothing much. Stick very rare in the market - seems to mainly exist only at the absolute bottom (like no multi model memory) and very top of the range territories. We now have a couple of £50 Absimas (CR3P, basic, but with all the important adjustments included) and a Noble (lovely, "low mid range" money) - sensible price/feature/quality levels at which there are no stick options. So just because of availability in the market and therefore avoiding the need to change from stick to wheel later, I'd go wheel.

One question I had was why do folk often start with harder damping settings front than rear? The shock travel numbers above give a possible answer, since wheel travel is not far different front to rear yet shock travel is about 1/3 less, so leverage ratio on the front shock is much greater. Ergo, for damping at the wheel to be the same you'd need about 1/3 more damping force in the shock. I guess this simple point would explain it? Combined with less weight on the front meaning there's perhaps less downside to simply levering up on the shock and increasing its damping to match? (hmm maybe not that - that would be cancelled out by the leverage ratio) Are buggies built with shorter front shocks for aesthetic reasons alone?

I like the roof. Is that a piece of sheet steel you made up yourself? The colour is a very original take on it. Very cool. From there I think leaving it sticker free could be a good call, or just a handful of choice ones. With mine I was aiming for a bare metal look but it ended up just looking silver. I'm going to do another body in a colour, not sure what yet.

@G-rem I assembled them this evening. The measurement you drew in red there is 50mm on the rear and 41.5mm front. The shafts are 49.6 and 40.7mm. So a difference between them of 8.9mm. This pic shows both assembled stock and compressed to the point that only thread is showing: So each shaft is close enough to bottoming out that I guess you would only increase travel by up to max about 3mm by going for a longer shaft. Maybe 4mm in the front. And that's to hitting the cap, which you probably don't want to do. Here are the rear then the two front shocks with short then long shafts in for comparison. Fully extended: Eye to eye is 93mm rear, 76.5mm front and 85mm for the front with the rear shaft in. And fully compressed: Compressed they are 65mm, 57.7mm and 62mm (that last one gets to the above c.3mm shorter than the rear because it's fully bottomed out into the cap). Edit: so this means travel is Rear: 28mm Front: 19mm Front maxed out with a longer shaft: up to 23mm (but probably not sensible to go to the extreme)

Thought it worth updating this thread since the talented @wtcc5 and @Quincy have solved this little problem. See here: Chuckle. So at some point I shall have a go at exactly this mod on my DT-03, but it can await future orders from PJ and modelsport.